You're a Good Person Who Got Duped

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Todd Leonard, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.

You pour your heart and soul into the people you serve and sacrifice for your colleagues and organization. You’ve heard it said, “Greater love has no one than this: that they lay down their life for their friends,” and you believe it. You’re tired, but you tell yourself it’s a good tired. You’re an astoundingly good person. Seriously. But I’ve got something to tell you: You’ve been duped.

Don’t feel bad. You’re not the first. And you won’t be the last. You just happened to grow up in or convert to a religion, join a community/civic group, follow a vocational calling into a certain helping profession, or pursue some other noble enterprise with well-meaning people.

See, you’re not being duped by con men, greedy barons or sinister villains twisting their evil mustaches; you’re being duped by some of the nicest, kindest and gentlest people on earth. And, in most cases, they don’t even realize they are doing the duping. This is what makes it so hard to detect.
What’s even scarier: you’re guilty of duping others too.

You weren’t duped into following your calling. That was real. Choosing to follow God; to be a nurse / teacher / [insert helping profession here]; to fight for justice for someone or some group—that’s you recognizing that you were made for something more than mere self-aggrandizement. But you were duped within that calling in a couple ways.

First, people in your church, your profession or your group tricked you into believing that if you didn’t give all of yourself to “the mission”—of God, of education, of LGBTQ rights—you weren’t actually a true—“Christian,” “lover of children,” or “ally.” There is an insidious purity culture attached to groups who pursue noble callings that creates an incredibly toxic performance environment where everyone has to do and say the right things in order maintain their “true believer” status. Again, this culture is so insidious that, most of the time, the leaders of the group don’t even know they’re perpetuating it, and you don’t realize that you yourself are perpetuating it. The result of this relentless pressure to achieve and maintain “true believer” status causes a constant shame, fatigue and paranoia that accompanies you in public. And it can lead to burnout, bitterness towards the organization, rejecting your calling and giving up on God.

You were duped into believing that your calling required you to leave friends, family, hobbies and other relationships and practices of self-care behind for the sake of the “true cause.” This is a lie. You must recognize it as such. God is not worth dying for (my theology says God doesn’t ask us to die). Your community is not worth you as a police officer sacrificing important family time for overtime. You can fight for improved access to services for people with disabilities and still spend a week at the beach.
But you’ll only survive if you recognize the dupe—the ask for extra hours, the guilt trips, the flattery, the Bible verses, your own need for compliments and feeling needed. You have nothing to prove. You’ve been called and you’ve been fulfilling that calling. Stop giviing in to the manipulation.

Second, for those of us who passionately desire to follow God; who are dedicated to bringing justice and transformation to our communities; and/or who are called into a helping profession; we get duped into believing that we can only accomplish our callings and passions within the group, organization, or specific job description where we first sensed that passion or call.

Religious culture and its adherents are the most manipulative about this. There is a great deal of effort exerted to make sure you know your current and future existence depend, not upon God alone, but upon God as understood by your religion. So despite whatever doubts you have, abuse you suffer or expanded mindset you long for, you suffer great psychological and spiritual angst from your authority figures and loved ones at the prospect of leaving your faith tradition. That is all by design by people who, for the most part, genuinely have your best interests at heart, but are limited by their own existential angst that they are projecting upon you. You’ve probably done the same thing, out of sincere motives, to your kids or other people you love who have considered leaving your faith.

But religious systems, at best, are only portals into the mystery of God. They’re not the complete revelation; just the entry point. At some point in life, you may feel the need to find a different entry point from the one you started out in. That’s fine. Others may be OK staying where you are. Either way, you need to free yourself from those systems’ manipulations to convince you that they are the only way to God. Stay open to the movements of the spirit that blow from many different directions.

But we’ve seen this peer pressure and organizational manipulation in social movements, too. Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X considered each other to be ultimately harmful to the cause of civil rights until later in the 60’s when they began to reconcile. But at that point Malcolm and the Nation of Islam broke apart to the point that many believe to this day that X’s assassination was at the hands of the Nation. People all working for the cause of black empowerment couldn’t work together. Can you believe that Black lives matter and not work for the official BLM organization? Of course. Don’t let any one organization tell you that you can only accomplish the mission of the cause through their specific 501c3.

Sadly, many people who started out in my profession of church pastor and shifted, like I’m doing, to chaplaincy or counseling, let alone another profession, or church pastoring in a different denomination, have suffered significant criticism for “rejecting” their calling from God when they left church ministry in their original denomination. Ex-pastors deal with a lot of shame as a result. Many of us have come to a conclusion that we can better follow God’s calling in a different career or organizational setting. We’re not rejecting the call; we’re continuing to follow. Others of us leave the calling, not because we weren’t called, but because we were beaten, battered and broken by the people and the institutions we tried to serve. This isn’t rejecting God; it’s protecting ourselves. If you’re considering or in the process of leaving your original helping profession career or your original organization, don’t let the haters tell you you’re wrong. You haven’t lost your calling. Keep going and live it out according to who you are and what you’re called to do now.

In summary, we’re all, to some degree, connected to groups of humans that create mythologies that help rally people to the cause and manipulate them to remain loyal to the cause. Recognize this. Do your best to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with these good people as you are able. But do your best to take care of yourself and those you love, and leave unhealthy environments when necessary.
Wherever you serve, do your best to live and communicate free of manipulation as much as possible. Be honest. Be authentic. Honor those in other groups. Learn from them. Support them. Don’t play games. We can do good without also having to win. As John Lennon invited us to do: Imagine.